Tech Circuit: Vocabulary Edition

David Cowen, president and managing director of The Cowen Group, spends about 40 weeks on the road, in a job that might be called matchmaking. Not the matrimonial kind of brokering, rather a more Malcolm Gladwell type of connecting. Cowen knows how to put together just the right combination of people to generate spirited conversations, the kind where you can’t wait to follow-up with individual participants to keep discussing the ideas.

That’s not easy to do, to put it mildly. Every year, Cowen and his team put on more than 50 "executive peer micro-events," bringing together elite lawyers, technologists, consultants, executives, and sometimes, an occasional journalist, to identify pain points and possible remedies in e-discovery, legal technology, litigation support, and information governance. His organization, with a primary agenda of headhunting, has increasingly been focusing on also developing research and analysis about trends in those four areas. Perhaps one of biggest reasons for Cowen’s success is that his vision is long-term, not one-offs — the conferences and research help his clients develop over the long haul, he’s not just in it for a single "sale." (A tactic also used by the most wise and effective real estate agents and car salespersons.)